Jules Verne's 130-Year-Old Look Ahead

Rubin, Merle, The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By Jules Verne

Translated by Richard Howard
Random House
240 pp. $21
One of science fiction's founding fathers, the 19th-century
French writer Jules Verne (1828-1905) not only predicted many of
the technological advances that would transform life in the 20th
century, but he also managed to tell some rousingly good adventure
stories in the process, including "Voyage to the Center of the
Earth," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and "Around the
World in Eighty Days."
Ironically, it has taken longer than a century for one of his
early efforts at novel writing to find a place in the sun. Composed
in 1863, Verne's vision of "Paris in the Twentieth Century" was
rejected by his publisher. The manuscript was only recently
discovered by the author's great-grandson, not only some 130 years
after it was penned, but more than three decades after the far-off
"futuristic" year in which Verne had set its story: 1960.
Criticized as unbelievable by the editor who turned it down,
Verne's novel anticipates such 20th-century innovations as subways,
automobiles, skyscrapers, electric lights, calculators, e-mail, and
fax machines. It is also a work of social prophesy: a dystopic
vision of a hyper-efficient, streamlined world that has no memory
of the past and no place for the human soul, a world where "if no
one read any longer, at least everyone could read...."
The story's protagonist is an idealistic youth, Michel Dufrenoy,
who has won his school's prize for Latin verse. But in 1960, such
an honor is but a dubious distinction, marking the young man as
master of an art deemed useless by a utilitarian society where the
only poems that gain favor are odes in praise of machinery.
Calculation is the order of the day, leaving no room for
imagination or sentiment. All activities - transportation,
communication, manufacturing, finance, education, and entertainment
- have been centralized. But, although the people of 1960 enjoy
peace, prosperity, and every modern convenience, they take their
technological marvels for granted and lead colorless lives driven
by the pursuit of money.
Only a handful of kindred spirits share young Michael's
subversive veneration for the vanished humanistic values. …

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